Saturday, July 12, 2008

Web 2.0 Question?

On LinkedIn, I wrote an answer to a question posed by one of my contacts, Bruce Chamoff. His question was, "When you think of the current Web 2.0 trend, what exactly comes to mind?"

Here is my answer. It's not perfect but that's ok:

I wrote an article on the subject for Banking New York Magazine. My description was focused for a banking professional audience, but it applies to Web 2.0 in general.

That article can be found here.

I would add that Web 2.0 takes browsing and creates an element of addition to the equation. Instead of simply receiving information from a central resource, Web 2.0 is a collectively increasing based on user interaction and content creation rather than encyclopedic-like entries. Web 1.0 was just like your set of encyclopedia on the bookshelf. It was a terrific resource and very useful but it did not allow for opinion or discussion within the pages. Some would say that's a good thing, considering the integrity of the data based on peer-review and vetting of facts that are not open to debate or influence by non-professionals. Others say that this creates an elitist academic attitude and that a collective knowledge may add information or perspectives previously unavailable or unfathomed at any other time in history.

For example, many field researchers or professionals on the front lines of any industry simply do not have the time to directly submit their expertise to the collective knowledge because previously writing up their knowledge in a format acceptable for publication was too time consuming. Many expert opinions were lost or were vetted out of a database of knowledge. Now the ease and accessibility of the Internet allows for free transfer of information springing directly from the mind to be accessed to anyone.

Web 2.0 allows peer-to-peer transfer of information without a self-interested filter in between changing or influencing that data.

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